SC Museum Brown Bag Lunch Lecture Series

When: Back to Calendar » August 2, 2012 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Where: SC Museum Annex
302 W Broadway St
Silver City,NM 88061
USA
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Cost: free
Contact: (575) 538-5921

“In Search of an Evolutionary Arms Race: Local Research in the Tarantula Hawk (Pepsis formosa) and Other Spider Wasps,” a Free Presentation at the Museum Annex. New Mexico is home to at least 80 species of spider-wasps, including the “tarantula hawk” (Pepsis formosa) which has been the official state insect since 1989.

Dr. Manda Clair Jost is a local biologist and professor of Natural Sciences at Western New Mexico University (WNMU). She graduated from a New Mexico high school (Cloudcroft) and later studied zoology and evolutionary biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Harvard University. At WNMU she teaches courses in general biology, invertebrate zoology, and evolution, and was a Fulbright Scholar to India in 2010-2011 for the purposes of teaching applied evolutionary research methods to students and scientists at more than 10 different Indian institutions. Her most recent work with spider-wasps (the topic of this presentation) is being funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.